He bent the heavens and came down… Psalm 18:9

All my thoughts, even the best, are incinerated to ash when I read such words as these, conceived in the heart of the Son, where in the infinite and living φως (phos), theology and poetry are indivisibly united in hypostatic fusion…

A: If our world had been formed and filled by some lesser god, I think he would have made the vast mistake of laboring with too straight a back.

His steely arrowed finger would stab the depths, jolting them to fertility. Then he’d raise his dripping arm, and glaring across the sudden plains, he’d loose a lightning lash of life.

Oh, I have some idea in what anguished, reaching pillars such a god would have cased our world. What scars of insistence would run through its nature; how straight, how measured, how devised a place it would be, where nothing arched or swept or curled, where nothing warbled when it sang!

B: Leave aside these imagined gods, sweet heart.

Here on earth the scars are all our own. Here we had a God, God enough to bend. He leaned, he stooped; beneath his brooding heart the very heaven curved into a dome.

Bow down and make with your form the sweet shape that pleased him.

A: Everywhere I walk on earth, I see the imprint of the Spirit’s sweeping courtesy.

Swimming heavens arch above my head; the swan’s neck is the gracefullest; ungainly forms of mothers in their hour find strength to curl and bend.

B: Yes, and I too was bowed in my hour.

A: Ah, gentle sir, just yesterday I saw a living image of yourself humbly draped in blue. I heard him say, “Joanna, servant of God…” while he leaned over a woman grown a child.

All his children, fifty or more, clustered around him in muted merriment. He fed their mouths like a mother bird. Behind, above him, the walls brooded in gold and colors and sober faces. They all inclined and cherished the little human family.

I knew it for the shape of the Universe. And if I ever needed proof…

B: Hush, dear, hush; don’t speak of proof. I have better things for you.

…now, let me stand back and watch the scene again, and hushed, listen to the words. Here is Wisdom speaking, as She speaks in the Word. And as the Word lives and lives on and on, heaven on earth shall never lack a witness. And for that, in joy, I sincerely weep.

The original text of the above, by Alana Roberts, can be read here.